Luedecke's Zettlekaten

Posted by 22111
Jan 23, 2014 at 03:14 PM

MenAgerie,

“The screen names is less a Tennessee Williams reference that a Billy Cobam and Bud Powell reference (although I misremembered the Bud Powell piece Glass Enclosure!).” - see? That’s what’s called lateral thinking ;-)

“I have very little experience with Zettlekasten - and none of AskSam.” - I mentioned AS since in fact, it’s a Zettlekasten prog by design which then has been spiced up somewhat.

“What I have found that seems to do what I want (academic social science/theory)” - perhaps others got the task at hand, BESIDES from those you mentioned; I did not. Let’s put it another way: What is the functionality any primitive, totally basic outliner would not be able to deliver?

From that, we could choose a more elaborate one, depending on your needs (since there isn’t any “perfect outliner” out there, so making compromise is a necessity here). Or from another pov again, what might be the problems the outliner concept as such could make arise in your task(s)? Or even simpler, since you use MI already, what are your current (or future, foreseeable) probs with MI, for the tasks at hand (since all those you mentioned would fit perfectly into what MI offers)?

As for NB, it’s said to be some (rather expensive, but academic pricing should be acceptable) derivative from (the defunct) XyWriter - when trialling NB, I didn’t see the similarities (I had extensively used XW several years, it was something incredibly good for its time (and even today), so that must be hidden under the hook. Anyway, I fled NB some 90 min. into my trialling and never touched it again (but that’s not necessarily an argument, or then possibly against me, not the sw).

“I simply feel like a fool sitting in front of Connected Text, not knowing what to do, or what is going on. Not a good attribute for a piece of software” - that is one thing (and well, let’s face it, the-interminable-andus (is it 6 years now? 8?) and Prof. Kühn are almost alone in saying that’s not true); additional offerings of CT might be another (which in extremis would justify your delving into it if that’s the only way) - we’ve had a discussion on “outlining plus something other” here some months ago, the search term would be “KEdit”.

This being said, if you’ve used MI extensively, and need something “better”, i.e. more appropriate for your special task, another look into AS might be indicated, and I’m 200 p.c. serious here. (= some kind of “programming language” for searching, even search for numeric values in different fields with “greater than” and all that, very elaborate combinations of any such search, “search in search results”, AND then output (“reports”) of anything if you need that (and which would be the prob with dtSearch if I’m not mistaken, but otherwise dtSearch is worth another look, too).

For “regular work”, Zeoli’s right in “not touching” AS, but for some scholars, AS might be the very best 3-digit-priced sw that has ever been programmed (and academic pricing’s available, too).

For the task of entangling AND differentiating “own work vs. reference material”, I’d try different colors / formatting and different indentation levels within the tree (so beware of UR where you could only could do this by symbols). Btw - here, I’ll make again unhappy Bill (wsp; but he can’t contradict me since it’s true), it’s precisely MI which had, many years ago yet, some descriptions of what its print and export functions ostensibly could do, re sub-groups of items, in its helpful (but functionality you weren’t able to trial since they were withheld for after buying), and then, boom, after buying, this part of the product was vaporware, and is vaporware even today.

Whilst AS does such things and always has done (be it deadware or not; and similar remarks apply to KEdit: “deadware’s not badware, necessarily” (all rights reserved; hint to would-be radio speakers)).